My daily readings 01/08/2010

But Jobs is also notoriously touchy and difficult to work with. He demands perfection and doesn’t really work well with others. And Jobs is distrustful of the press. Apple’s PR group is mostly there to not return calls.

We forgive him all that, of course. Because he’s changing the world, and forces competitors to do better just to try to keep up. The world, particularly the tech world, is a far more colorful place because of Jobs. There is no one at Apple who has the product vision to push that company forward once he steps down. He’s the Alexander the Great of today’s tech world. And he’s also able to captivate a crowd when he’s on stage.

But Rubin is a product fanatic in the same way that Jobs is. The NY Times did a good overview of Rubin in 2005. One line about Rubin, a former Apple engineer and cofounder of WebTV and Danger, stuck with me from that article: “Mr. Rubin is a proven member of an earlier group of engineers-turned-entrepreneurs who have a passion for building complete digital systems.”

He has incredible power within the Android group at Google, and even VPs at Google there make sure not to cross him. People who work with him have told me of his amazing attention to detail and his unbending demands that a product be perfect before it goes out the door. A lot of that shows in the Nexus One, Google’s first complete end to end hardware and software system.